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There’s a particular sound when the ink roller hits the litho stone just right, that sort of soft, sticky drag. It’s not like anything else, not the scrape of a blade on lino or the hiss of a spray can. It’s a sound that means you’re getting somewhere, that the image is starting to lift off the stone and onto the paper. Spent all morning with that sound, trying to get a really deep black on this new piece. It’s not a hare this time, something a bit different, but the same old graft really. You get lost in it, you know? The world outside just fades away and it’s only you and the stone and the smell of the ink. Grand way to spend a Tuesday, I’ll tell you that for nothing.

Picking out a block of limestone this morning. Twenty years I've been buying from the same yard. Kid working there, maybe 25, sees me checking for fissures and starts telling me about CNC waterjets and how much waste I could save. I told him I don't want to save waste. I want the stone to tell me where to cut. He looked at me like I was speaking Latin. Not mad about the tech. It's fine for some things. But I'm not trying to produce units. I'm trying to find what's already in there. You can't program a machine to do that and pretending you can is how you end up with a thousand identical smooth river stones that all look like nothing.

Back when I was still doing fabrication for other artists, I used to buy a lot of limestone from this old guy out in Indiana. Third generation quarry family. Tough customer. You showed up late, he'd make you wait. You talked too much, he'd just walk away mid-sentence. One day I'm complaining about a commission that fell through. Client loved the maquette, then ghosted. I'd put three weeks into it. He's loading stone onto my truck and he doesn't even look up. Says "Did you ask for money before you started?" No. Of course not. I was young and wanted the work. He says "Then you didn't have a client. You had a hope." That stuck with me. For years I operated like making the thing was the hard part and selling it would just happen if the work was good enough. That's not how it works. The stone dealer knew that. The gallerists I've dealt with know it too, they just don't say it out loud because the silence benefits them. I'm not saying be a salesman. I'm saying the transaction is part of the arrangement, not an afterthought. If you can't talk about money with someone before you make them anything, you don't have a deal yet.

Had a young guy at the booth this weekend, looked at my price tag, nodded like he'd figured something out. Said he could probably do the same thing himself with a Dremel and some YouTube tutorials. I said maybe he could. But I'd been thinking about it all evening and it still bothers me. Not the disrespect, I don't care about that. What bothers me is the assumption that the tool is what matters. Like the only difference between me and him is I own bigger equipment. I've got a 50lb tungsten chisel that I dressed myself because nothing on the market was right for the cut I needed. I spent three months learning to sharpen it right. A Dremel wont teach you how to read grain or when to walk away or what to do when you're 40 hours in and the stone decides to split wrong. Anyway. He walked off with a print. Probably gonna try to carve it this weekend. I hope he does. That's how you learn the difference between wanting to make something and wanting to have made something.

I see younger sculptors reaching for angle grinders before they've learned to read the grain. Take a five-pound sledge and a good point chisel and you'll find out in the first five minutes whether you're fighting the stone or working with it. A grinder just makes dust faster. It doesn't teach you anything. I had a chunk of Indiana limestone on the bench today, been sitting there six months because I wasn't sure what it wanted. Took the sledge to it this morning. Knew in ten swings. Sometimes you just have to commit and see what happens.

Not sculpture exactly, but close enough. Neighbor's property line needed a wall after a bad washout. I told him I'd do it for the cost of materials if he left me alone to work. Took all summer between other jobs. Dry-stack is a different kind of patience. No mortar to hide behind. Every stone has to lock in on its own weight. You spend half the time flipping rocks trying to find the face that wants to sit where you need it. Then you tap it in with a hammer and it either rings solid or you pull it back out. Laid the capstone this afternoon. It's four feet high, thirty feet long, and it'll be there after I'm gone. That's the part that still gets me after all these years.

Been working a piece of French limestone for six days now. Every time I think I've found the line, the stone throws a hidden vein or a fissure I didn't see and I have to stop and rethink. Not the kind you can bully through. You push and it'll break in the wrong place. Put it down and walked away three times today. Came back the third time and just sat on the bench looking at it for twenty minutes. Didn't touch a tool. My father would have called that lazy. I call it listening. Finally took off about half a kilo in one go that felt right. Tomorrow I'll probably hate it. That's how it goes sometimes.

You know that moment when you're three rows into a section and you realize the particular batch of smalti you pulled has just slightly too much green in the blue, and now the whole thing reads like a bruise instead of sky, and nobody else would ever notice, but you notice, and it's going to burn a hole in your head for the next ten years if you leave it. So I unpicked the whole section. Recut the curve from a different batch. It took three days and the difference is barely there. But it's there. My conservator friends would say this is insane. My regular friends don't understand why I didn't just paint it. My cat sat on the loose pieces twice. Anyway the curve is right now. Worth it? I'll let you know when my knees forgive me. 🙃

Still sitting in the corner of the shop. A five-foot chunk of Indiana limestone I took on six years ago. Customer wanted a figure, paid half up front, then disappeared. I stopped waiting after year two but I can't bring myself to cut it up for scrap. Every few months I walk past it and think about what it wanted to be before I took the commission. I knew better. You never take on work you don't believe in just because the money's good. But I did, and now there's this block I walk around like a piece of furniture I hate. Anyone else got a piece like that? The one that should have been something else but you made the wrong deal and now it just sits there.

Kid couldn't have been older than twenty. Points at a piece I'm loading out, thirty pound chunk of basalt I spent three weeks on. Asks if I found it like that. I said no, I carved it. He says yeah but did you make the rock or did you find the rock. I told him I found the rock. Four hundred million years old, I didn't make it. But I sure as hell made what's inside it. He nodded like I was humoring him and walked off. Not his fault. Nobody teaches looking anymore. They think if it didn't come out of a machine it must have washed up on a beach fully formed.

There's a five-gallon bucket under my main bench that's been collecting offcuts for two years now. Granite chips, bits of alabaster, broken corners off pieces I finished or ruined. I tell myself I'll use them for something someday. Mosaic maybe. Or just crush them for texture in a base. I've never done it. I just keep dropping scraps in there and looking at it sometimes. Some habits are just habits. Not everything needs a reason. But I notice the bucket when I'm stuck on something and it's the only thing in the shop I don't have an opinion about.

I'm not good at pricing what my time is worth and I know it. Married couple wanted a limestone piece for their garden. Simple shape, clean lines, nothing fussy. I quoted $6,000 thinking that was plenty. 80 hours later I'm doing the math. Block of limestone was $1,100. Delivery of the block was $300 because it had to come on a flatbed. The chisels I wore down and replaced, maybe $150. Then the base I fabricated to mount it, another $200 in steel. That's $1,750 in costs. Leaves me $4,250. Divided by 80 hours, that's $53 an hour before taxes. Not terrible for a sculptor maybe but I'm not a young man and my body feels those hours now. The thing is they were happy. They paid without blinking. So I left money on the table and they'd have given me more. That's on me. I don't know how to fix this. I've been doing this long enough I should know what I'm worth. But I still anchor low and feel guilty asking for more.

Some guy shows up at the studio today with a chunk of marble he bought online. Says he's been "sculpting" for six months. Wants me to look at a crack running through the middle of it and tell him how to fill it so you can't see it. I told him you can't hide a crack in stone. You work with it or you start over. He says no, I saw a video where they use epoxy and marble dust and you can't even tell. I asked him what he's making. He says he hasn't decided yet, he just liked the stone. Six months. Doesn't know what he's making. But he's worried about covering a crack with epoxy. I told him to use the epoxy. What do I care. He'll figure it out in another six months when it fails and he's got a yellow line through his piece.

Bought a block of Carrara from a supplier I've used for years. Looked clean on the pallet. Got it on the bench, started roughing out, and about three hours in a hairline opens up right where I'm working. Not a surface crack. It was inside the damn stone. Now I've got a piece that's either going to be smaller than I planned or I scrap it entirely. Supplier says not their problem, stone is a natural material, inspect before you work. Which is true. But also infuriating. Twenty years ago I would have kept hammering and ruined it. Now I stop and stare at it for ten minutes and then go weld something instead. Progress I guess.

There's a fella in the market who sharpens things for a living. Kitchen knives, secateurs, shears, he's there every Saturday with his stones and his strops and a little whetstone wheel rigged up to a bicycle chain somehow, and sure it's an education to watch him. I brought him my best carving gouge last week because I'd nicked the edge on something stupid, a staple I'd missed in a bit of lino, was raging with myself, and he handed it back and just said "whoever taught you to sharpen taught you right." And I thought about that more than I expected to. I learned from an old printer up in Sligo, man who could carve a heron's wing feather in a single cut and make it look like breathing. He taught me to sharpen dry, no oil, on a fine arkansas stone, and to feel the burr with your thumb rather than look for it. He'd say "you're not grinding metal, you're coaxing an edge out of it" and I used to think that was gas altogether till I realised he meant it. Anyway it got me thinking about how much of how we make things is just passed hand to hand like that. Little rituals. The way you hold your knife. The angle you trust without measuring. Someone showed you once and you've been doing it their way ever since, maybe without even knowing. I still sharpen dry. I check with my thumb. And I think of him every time.

Was in a church in the old town today, not for work, just wandered in. And there's this floor mosaic I've walked past maybe a hundred times, Roman, nothing special, geometric, the tesserae are rough and uneven, some have come loose. But today I sat down on the cold stone and just looked at it for fifteen minutes. Some woman thought I was having a crisis. I was having a crisis actually. Crisis of admiration. The person who laid that floor, their hammer strokes are still in the stone. Pieces they cut with their own hands, eighteen hundred years ago, still holding. And I sit on my own floor at home, cutting the same material, same gestures, same ache in the neck after too long. I don't know why it hit me today and not the other times. Maybe I needed it to. Anyway if you've never sat on a church floor staring at somebody else's work for a quarter of an hour, try it. Feels strange and good.

Got a piece of basalt I've been working for weeks. Nice stone, dense, good color. Had the form mostly there. One more pass with the point chisel to clean up the belly and a crack ran clean through it. Not a clean break either. The kind that leaves a fault line you can't grind out because you'd lose half the piece. Thing is I saw the vein three days ago and told myself it would hold. Knew better. Just didn't want to start over on a new block. Nothing to do with the stone. That's on me. You push when you should stop and set up. Twenty-five year old me would have caught it. Sixty-one year old me got impatient.

Been fighting with shop lighting for thirty years and I'm still not sure I've got it right. You need enough to see what you're doing to stone, but too much and you lose all the shadow work that tells you where the form actually is. I've got four different temperature bulbs clamped to beams in here and I swap them depending on the day. Right now I'm working under a single warm 60w on a drop cord because the piece told me it wanted to be seen that way. Sounds ridiculous. It's not.

Got asked to do a live demo at a gallery opening in Athens next month. They said "the guests would love to watch you work." I said do you know what mosaic looks like in real time? Because I sit on a pillow on the floor and cut one piece of stone at a time and stare at it for ten minutes before I set it. That's a Tuesday. It's not performance, it's just slow. They said it's fine, people find it meditative. We'll see. Anyone else get asked to turn their studio practice into a show and find out it doesn't translate?

I got lucky. A fabricator I was working for told a dealer about me. She came to the studio, looked at what I was doing with stone, said "bring me six pieces." No pitch, no portfolio review, no drama. Just a nod and a handshake. That was twenty-something years ago. I don't think that route exists much anymore. How did you land your first real gallery? Not the one that took your work on consignment and forgot about it. The one that actually sold your stuff and called you back.